Strata Conference Santa Clara 2013 Call for Participation

Call
closed
11:59pm 10/07/2012 PDT.

Making Data Work

The O’Reilly Strata Conference explores the change brought to technology and business by big data, data science, and pervasive computing. We are inviting proposals for presentations from practitioners, business leaders, analysts, designers, and developers. We’re interested in success stories, best practices, failures, cautionary tales, and future developments. We want to hear stories and innovation from the worlds of finance, the web, media, retail, telecoms, government, and more.

As well as our usual program, here are some topics for which we are inviting proposals for the first time in Strata 2013:

Geodata, mapping, mobility and location—O’Reilly will not be producing the Where conference in 2013, and we are excited to incorporate these topics into Strata

Just the basics—as many new people join our field, we’re looking for high quality introductory sessions to topics

Give your proposal a simple and straightforward title. Clever or inappropriate titles make it harder for people to figure out what you’re really talking about

Include as much detail about the planned presentation as possible. The longer the talk you’re proposing, the more detail you should provide

If you are proposing a panel, tell us who else would be on it

Keep proposals free of marketing and sales

If you are not the speaker, provide the contact information of the person you’re suggesting. We tend to ignore proposals submitted by PR agencies unless we can reach the suggested participant directly. Improve the proposal’s chances of being accepted by working closely with the presenter(s) to write a jargon-free proposal that contains clear value for attendees

Context is important. If your presentation is about something truly ground-breaking, it will be helpful to the reviewers if you describe it in terms of things that attendees might already know of

Limit the scope of the talk: in 40 minutes, you won’t be able to cover Everything about Framework X. Instead, pick a useful aspect, or a particular technique, or walk through a simple program

Explain why people will want to attend: is your topic gaining traction? Is it critical to modern business? Will attendees learn how to use it, program it, or just what it is?

Repeated talks from the conference circuit are less likely to be appealing. The conference has a limited number of slots, and if attendees can see the same talk somewhere else, why should they come see you at this one? If you speak at a lot of events, be sure to note why this presentation is different

Don’t assume that your company’s name buys you credibility. If you’re talking about something important that you have specific knowledge of because of what your company does, spell that out in the description

Let us know in your proposal notes whether you can give all the talks you submitted proposals for

Does your presentation have the participation of a woman, person of color, or member of another group often underrepresented at tech conferences? Diversity is one of the factors we seriously consider when reviewing proposals as we seek to broaden our speaker roster

We welcome sessions for attendees with a variety of skill levels. Consider proposing a number of different skill-level sessions, and please indicate the experience and knowledge level of the audience that you are targeting: novice, intermediate, or expert.